blogrium

The Information Age is directly responsible for the modern generalist because it makes specialist knowledge so accessible. The main product of the Information Age is most undoubtably the web, which is based on ideas of linking and interconnecting across information. When it’s all there and hyperlinked, you’re just asking for generalists. Those in the tech industry are exposed to it the most, so no doubt that’s where you find the most generalists.

The generalist is commonly made analogous to the Renaissance Man of the 15th, 16th century. But the Age of Enlightment in the 18th century was another period of generalism. And now the 21st century. It seems every 300 years we go into a period of integration. During this time, progress switches from going deep to going wide and we focus on leveraging everything that’s been developed over the past 100 years. That last century represents the latest iteration of ideas that have been developed over those 300 years.

It seems reasonable that you can only go deep for so long before you start hit diminishing returns. At that point you need something major to change, which can only come from integration and reflection on what progress has been made, and then looking at it in a greater context. That’s where breakthroughs happen that change worldviews and major underlying assumptions. This opens the door to progress going deep in that direction for the next 300 years.

So what does that mean for us now? New shouldn’t be valued as much as old. Sure, we should focus on progress, but let’s get that progress by looking at the past and integrating efforts of before. At the time, most of the work was done in silos. Pull them out of the silos, dust them off, shine them up a bit, and just look at them until you see something that wasn’t there before.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 5:24 am and is filed under Abstract, Generalism, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.